IC 3461

IC 3461 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 46 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 9,800 ly, about 10% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 1,243 km/s.

Because its light is 46 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3461 as it looked roughly 46 million years ago. The photons left before that much of history had passed, and are only now reaching us. This distance is estimated from the galaxy's redshift, so the lookback time is approximate.

Source: structural data (position, morphology, brightness, redshift) from OpenNGC (CC BY-SA). Recession velocity from RC3 (de Vaucouleurs et al. 1991, via NASA/HEASARC, public domain). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).